Entirely agreed. Other users' points about the tone of the article ring true to me as well, and they are only hurting people's impression of the tool, which is

Entirely agreed. Other users' points about the tone of the article ring true to me as well, and they are only hurting people's impression of the tool, which is unfortunate; I use both ack and grep (my regex comfort level is not extremely high, so grep -v is still a common fallback). For the curious: It's "ack-grep" in Ubuntu's package manager (and presumably Debian, though I can't say for sure); I stick it on every machine/server I set up just to have it handy. Queries to the effect of ack-grep --python ClassName yield fast, readable, extremely useful output, as you mention. That's why I use it in addition to grep.